An Hour of Giving

by Alison Scott ·
Published October 27, 2017
· Updated October 27, 2017

Nick Loper’s Side Hustle Nation is full of things you should be reading. He does a great podcast in which he interviews side hustlers, and this week he spoke to freelance photographer turned entrepreneurial coach Vincent Pugliese. As so often, the takeaways for me weren’t necessarily the obvious ones. Late into the episode, Pugliese talks about spending an hour a day on ‘giving back’. He admits he’s quite a selfish person, so has had to train himself to do this. But he spends an hour each day feeding back to people who have helped him, writing reviews, answering questions helpfully, and so on. There’s no immediate reward, but over time it’s helped him build a really solid network. And that, in turn, led to a book deal.

Pugliese started as a photo-journalist, and networking skills are a key part of the toolbox for any sort of journalist. Many of the networking skills aren’t straightforward for me – but answering questions, that I know I can do, and I’m going to try to do more.